What is happening to my Zoas!!

jimxms

New member
About a month ago I had an unnoticed reactor failure which caused my nitrates to go over 100ppm. At the same time a lot of my zoas closed up and melted away.

Since then I've got the nitrates back in check several pretty large 50% water changes, and I've also started running an algae scrubber which has helped to slowly bring nitrates down.

My filtration consists of a arcadia gyractor with bio pearls, bubble magus G5 skimmer (running Ozone), and a algae scrubber.

As my tank stands today my params are as follows:

NH3: 0.003ppm (on Seneye), 0ppm (Red Sea + API).
NO2: 0ppm (Red Sea + API)
NO3: 20ppm (Red Sea), 30ppm (API)
P04: 0.02ppm (Red Sea Pro)
PH: 8.14
Temp: 25.8c
ORP: 188mV (vs RO water tested at 177mV)

Based on these params I decided to purchase some more zoas for my tank. I found a big zoa garden on a rock at my local LFS and put it in my tank.

On day 1 all zoas were closed (to be expected), by day 3 half of the zoas had started melting away. The other half had opened but were shrivelled in comparison to how they looked in the lfs. I decided to put a big bag of carbon in the sump to see if this helped - it didnt'! Now the rock is just covered in the slime of dead zoas :(

The zoas are not near any corals that could sting them.

My tank has a hammer, galaxia, pink bta, some sps, lots of mushrooms, green star polyps, trumpet coral, elegance....all of these are looking healthy with the exception of the elegance (which has been closed for a few days).

What gives?
 
Check your alk for sure, also 188mv is awfully low, esp for a tank running ozone. Should shoot for 300-400mv.
 
Check your alk for sure, also 188mv is awfully low, esp for a tank running ozone. Should shoot for 300-400mv.

Ok I'll test that now - I think it should be OK though as I've been performing quite a few water changes recently and I wouldn't think that it should be close to my salt alk levels.

I'm not sure what to make of the Ozone thing really. I have my generator on its lowest setting so I doubt that its actually putting much into the water, and I have carbon on the skimmer outlet to mop up any excess. My ORP meter could also be well outta whack.
 
Ok so my Alk is 10dkh. Not sure how that fairs?

EDIT:

I take that back. I just did the testing again using my Red Sea Pro kit (twice) and both times the plunger went from 1ml to 0.4ml before changing, so this appears to be a dKH of 8.4
 
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It just seems weird that all this has started happening after my tank semi-crashed :(

Is there anything I can run to rid it of a bacterial infection? Maybe ramp up the ozone for a few days?

Would running a large quantity of carbon or a polyfilter help?

My zoa Rock has only a few closed heads remaining so if I can bring it back from dead id like to try anything
 
My zoas are virtually industructable. I try to kill them off and still find them establishing colonies in parts of the tank I hadn't noticed before. Now if my SPS would only behave that way we would all be happy :P
 
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